The beverage industry presently uses a wide variety of containers in packaging a vast assortment of materials and combination of materials, e.g., paperboard, glass, metals such as aluminum, and various plastics. Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages associated with each material. For example, wax coated paperboard is a relatively strong and inexpensive container material, but unfortunately it is quite permeable to gases such as oxygen. Therefore, beverages stored in paperboard containers tend to lose their freshness and degrade over a short period of time. In comparison, containers made from glass, metals, and some plastics are relatively impermeable to gases, but are rather expensive due to the high cost of those materials.
In recent years, the beverage industry has turned to bag-in-box (BIB) composite containers to package such products as bulk milk and wine. These BIB composite containers, which basically consist of a plastic inner bag within a sturdy outer paperboard box, combine the low cost strength of paperboard with the protection offered by various plastics. If made of the proper materials, i.e., paperboard for the outer box and plastic for the inner bag, both the inner bag and the outer box can be recycled. However, with most BIB composite containers the inner bag and the outer box are not easily separable from one another.
Some prior art bag-in-box composite containers have an inner bag the spout of which is affixed to the outer container in such a way that it precludes removal of the inner bag from the outer container except for the destruction of the complex attachment mechanism. Other prior art composite bag-in-box containers have an inner bag which is glued to the outer box. Overall, separation of the inner bag from the outer box is difficult with the prior art bag-in-box containers.